Just installed a Xigmatek Dark Knight LGA1366 :-)

so i had a different cooler before, and it went bad, so I switched back to stock... now i ordered a different cooler, and got the Xigmatek Dark Knight LGA1366 cooler. And i must say, this thing is NICE for $40. It cools better then my previous cooler (Coolermaster V8) surprisingly... but since it went bad, it may not have been doing its full potential. Regardless I went with something a lil different... this thing is HUGE though. The craftsmanship is also very nice. The thermal grease that comes with it seems to also be high quality. It looks great...best looking aftermarket cooler ive ever seen!!! The black nickle coating really stands out, and looks wonderful!

First shot is after 15+ minutes of prime95, and as you can see, hottest it got was 59celsius... but was holding steady at 57celsius... stock cooler was in the 70+ celsius range (Stock clocks, this is also on stock clock speed as well)

Coolermaster V8 did rather poor, and was in the mid 60's under load.

I am very happy

BTW, this is a core i7 920 setup/X-58 ASUS P6T Deluxe MB. I am about to take it up to 3.6ghz and see how she does. :-)

Here is the screenshot, and pics on first bootup

Looks pretty good, that is a nice system you have there sir.

I do have a concern, all those wires. they are actually probably adding a solid 4-5c to your temps. because they are killing your airflow. the Antec 900 is a decent case with some great airflow. all those fans in there. and mainly the two 120mm front fans, and the top 200mm fan. but ALL those wires bundled in the front upper middle area is stopping almost all the airflow from front to back. I'm pretty sure you'd see temp decreases with some cable management.

I'm not sure how long you've had the Antec 900, but if you've bought it in the last 6 months. they came out with a revision where they cut some holes in the motherboard tray for cable management. What I've learned helps the most. is to try and seperate all the wires. I actually took them through to the backside of the mobo tray. and I have them going from bottom to top on the back side. and don't overlap any or the sidepanel will not fit back on. but you should be able to hide most of those. and is that a HD sitting sideways I see in one of those pictures.??

see something like this will help airflow and temps. I have more wires than you.. all hidden. most are behind the motherboard tray between it and the sidepanel.



I also have a picture before water-cooling, in my old case that is comparable to the antec 900.. it's a bad picture. but this is how my back panel looked. and the side actually still fits on when you do this.



good luck. this would help ur temps. (But don't bundle the main PSU wires like the 24 pin, 8 pin and PCI-E 6 pins all together like I did. as that part I had to redo to get the panel to go on.. so don't do that)

yes lol it is a HDD from my old PC. i just slapped it in there to try and get it to spin up, but having some issues with it.


GOing to shut down now and try to wed the wires through the motherboard tray post back up when i am done!

good luck sir

xguntherc said:

Click to expand...

Hey xguntherc

I know how you do it but that cable management is absolutely amazing.............AWE
You put me to shame every time
Have you ever thought about doing this professionally

Pooch

ok, well i gave it a shot...My case has 2 holes, and thats it...i really wish i could do something with the CPU wire, but I cannot. it is not long enough


Def notice a difference in temps... idling at 37c at 3.8ghz OC....

any ideas?

Smokkinu, the Coolermaster HyperN520 is just about the same architecture as your heatsink, copper base & all aluminum fins. They supplied dual 120mm fans so it is conserving the cpu & the overall airflow in the chassis Mine was around $55 with taxes.
I must admit, 59C is a lot while the N520 on full load, 12 hour span reaches slightly over 40C dude. Are you overclocking the beast?
There is always a lot speculation on this particular company for their flashy product line and much less quality (Cosmos S chassis ~ JOKE!) but this cpu cooler is well crafted & I'm surprised.
xguntherc, that's the way all wiring's in a chassis should be proposed. You have tools to work out with the chassis but not all of them are like that.

Gnys said:

Smokkinu, the Coolermaster HyperN520 is just about the same architecture as your heatsink, copper base & all aluminum fins. They supplied dual 120mm fans so it is conserving the cpu & the overall airflow in the chassis Mine was around $55 with taxes.
I must admit, 59C is a lot while the N520 on full load, 12 hour span reaches slightly over 40C dude. Are you overclocking the beast?
There is always a lot speculation on this particular company for their flashy product line and much less quality (Cosmos S chassis ~ JOKE!) but this cpu cooler is well crafted & I'm surprised.
xguntherc, that's the way all wiring's in a chassis should be proposed. You have tools to work out with the chassis but not all of them are like that.

Click to expand...

im a lil confused by your post? I had the coolermaster V8 is the N520 the same thing? anyway, i was not happy with it, looked great but just didnt work...sent it back and saved money with this cooler and getting great performance


right now i am OC'ing my core i7 920 to core i7 965 (3.2ghz) I can go to 3.8ghz but backed it back down...

my 3dmark score is almost in the 20k mark.... not bad i must say

Nope, V8 is a larger heatsink and supposely quite the performer. HyperN520 is just like yours but only Coolermaster. My mistake their dual 92mm fans but seemed to my eye as 120mm.
EXTREME Overclocking - Cooler Master Hyper N520 CPU Cooler Review - Page: 1 - Tweaking PC Hardware To The Max

nice rig SMOKKINU....

those are great load temps!!!, you cant beat a ''good quality'' aftermarket cooler...

as you can see heat dissipation is night & day difference from the stock POS...





SK

Indeed, very nice rig SMOKKINU! But when you put those wires through the mobo tray, you should try to spread those wires out on the back of the tray, not just have them go back in there in the next hole, only saving 10cm or so like that.. You should try and get most of the lenth of the wires gone behind the mobo tray.. Look at gunthers, or here's mine (not as good as his, but I do my best...)



Cheers,

Amplid

i did not really have much of a choice. the wires are not that long. having them go out and back in tookup some slack, and cleaned things up a bit... but i spent 2hrs figuring out the best options and that is what I came up with. :-(


maybe gunther can come work his magic :-)

Lol..

Oh well if you're happy with it, so should we At least your specs don't suck like mine lol

Amplid

SMOKKINU said:

ok, well i gave it a shot...My case has 2 holes, and thats it...i
any ideas?

Click to expand...

You can always grab a ATX cable extension for the CPU cord and perhaps some others to help give you some leeway. Keep it up

amplid said:

Look at gunthers, or here's mine (not as good as his, but I do my best...)

Cheers,

Amplid

Click to expand...

Still looks nice and tidy mate

Nice work - when I built my rig, I had to improvise a lot of cable management myself, and in the end, when I went o dual GTX260s I sacrificed some cable management because of it, as I all of a sudden had more cables to get in my way.

Still, I think I did all right, for someone new to cable management and quad core processors....

Picasa Web Albums - johnlgalt - The Beast

Still, though, that was some time well spent - with my Tower 120 LFB (arguably one of the to three LGA 775 air coolers of its generation) I couldn't get my processor to break 60 degrees no matter what I did - I and I am running a 33% OC 24/7/365 on my machine, @ 3.21 GHz.

Next time around I am looking for cases that support my need for cleanliness (I clean out this case once a month minimum - but since I do it that often it is a breeze to do it - without having to power off the machine).

Thanks for the compliments pooch, I'd like to do this professionally. I've been building them for friends and family, and locally on craigslist for a little while now. and I love it. I guess mine does look pretty clean huh. especially for how much stuff is really in that case. it's got all the wires everyone else has.. plus the 3 additional fans up top. and the 2 extra wires coming out of the water cooling pump. and I now have 2 12" UV cathodes in there and I completely hid those wires also.

so, SMOKKINU.. yes you can do more to it. Personally you should keep the overclock around 3.4-3.6 Ghz to get the most out of that 285. if you didn't like the high temps. I'm thinking 3.4 Ghz would be perfect for you. but you should be able to get 4.0 Ghz on it if you really really tried..

So what are your current temps now on stock, and overclocked speeds idle, and load? are they better than before or no?

Also. yes you can get a extender cable for your 8 pin CPU Cable. I'd highly recommend doing that. I've heard of that problem on the Antec 900, but that big PSU it looks long enough. take it through the bottom hole and take it up, and over like in my picture. it should fit, if not get the extender.

Also, I see what you did. and like Amplid said. you just went out the back, and back in. but the majority of the wires are still inside your case. what you should do is plug every cable in. and then pull as much slack out the back as possible and tape it, or ziptie.. just have only the amount of wire needed out in the case airflow area... it can be done, I know it's pretty hard though. I spend a decent amount of time on mine, but I wanted results. and I got em

Good luck. PM me if you need to.

oh yea, buy this. I've bought hundred of dollars of things from performance-pcs.com. they are a great site. it's a guy that runs the store. He's very nice, and very helpful. if something looks weird in your order. he'll call or email you before hand and save you the trouble. it's a great site. get this instead of some cheap $2.99 one from ebay. This is sleeved. it looks better, and will only help with how clean the cables look.

8-Pin (EPS12V) Extension Cable 12 Inches - Sleeved [8-PIN-EXT] : Performance-PCs.com, ... sleeve it and they will come

and you could get this if you wanted to make the 24 pin cable longer so you can hide it in the back, and save room, and use this 8 pin adapter also, but I'd rather have the sleeved one above. Thats why mine looks clean, all my wires are sleeved black.. so they are hard to see. other than the main PSU cable.
http://www.performance-pcs.com/cata...ge=product_info&cPath=34_186&products_id=3156

good luck

smarteyeball said:

Still looks nice and tidy mate

Click to expand...

Lol, thanks I should get the inside of it sprayed as well, so you see 'em even less, but just too lazy... Maybe by the end of this year when I'm getting new mobo cpu and ram..

Amplid

johngalt said:

Nice work - when I built my rig, I had to improvise a lot of cable management myself, and in the end, when I went o dual GTX260s I sacrificed some cable management because of it, as I all of a sudden had more cables to get in my way.

Still, I think I did all right, for someone new to cable management and quad core processors....

Picasa Web Albums - johnlgalt - The Beast

Still, though, that was some time well spent - with my Tower 120 LFB (arguably one of the to three LGA 775 air coolers of its generation) I couldn't get my processor to break 60 degrees no matter what I did - I and I am running a 33% OC 24/7/365 on my machine, @ 3.21 GHz.

Next time around I am looking for cases that support my need for cleanliness (I clean out this case once a month minimum - but since I do it that often it is a breeze to do it - without having to power off the machine).

Click to expand...

Dude, you should consider on rotating psu down so it's blowing cold air inside the case. It contributes a lot to the overall temperature of the chassis Other than that, considering the amount of cables you have, looks alright to me. If you have any clamps or cable ties, use them to the advantage because they are able to simultaneously compress a large amount of cables. I like the strap-on method you used in the back of the right side panel. Nice work.
Ultimately if you want excellent wiring and other accesories (chassis architecture, excellent cooling air flow, etc.) might want to research prior to purchasing. It'll take time because there is a lot chassis's on the market but it's well worth the trouble & headache in the end.